Psycho's Movie Reviews #302: Tale Of Tales (2015)

Tale of Tales is a 2015 European fantasy film co-written, directed and co-produced by Matteo Garrone and starring Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, and John C. Reilly.

An Italian-led production with co-producers in France and the United Kingdom, Tale of Tales is Garrone's only English-language film. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

It is a screen adaptation based on collections of tales by Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile: Pentamerone or Lo cunto de li cunti (Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones), which contains the earliest versions of famous fables like Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. The three tales are La Cerva Fatata (The Enchanted Doe), La Pulce (The Flea), La Vecchia Scorticata (The Flayed Old Lady), which have been freely adapted with elements of other tales by Giambattista Basile as well as a touch of artistic license.

Plot

The movie consists of 3 stories:

The Enchanted Doe

In the kingdom of Longtrellis, the King and Queen cannot conceive a child. A necromancer suggests that if the Queen eats a sea dragon's heart cooked by a virgin, she will become with child but this will cost a life. The King slays the sea dragon but dies from his wounds. The Queen eats the heart and the next day bears a son, Elias, with hair as white as the dragon. The cook also gives birth to a boy, Jonah. The boys are identical and inseparable friends. This so vexes the Queen that she attempts to murder Jonah, though he manages to escape. Jonah leaves the kingdom, plunging a knife into a tree root and telling Elias that as long as the root spouts clear water, he is alive and well. One day the water is clouded with blood. Elias leaves to find Jonah. The Queen has her subjects search for Elias to no avail. The necromancer blames the Queen and says the youths are truly inseparable, and that her violent desire can be achieved only through violence. Elias finds Jonah wounded in a cave. They are threatened by a monster, which wounds Jonah but hesitates to attack Elias, who kills the monster and returns Jonah to his wife. In the cave, the monster's corpse dissolves into that of the Queen.

The Flayed Old Lady

The lustful King of Strongcliff is intrigued by the sound of a woman's heavenly singing. He courts her outside her home, unaware that she is one of two elderly sisters, Imma and Dora. Dora agrees to spend the night with him as long as it is in complete darkness. He is horrified when he sees her appearance the next morning and has his guards throw her out of the window. She survives, entangled in the branches of a tree. A witch rescues her and nurses her from her breast. Dora awakens as a young, beautiful maiden. The King comes upon her while hunting and decides to make her his Queen. Dora invites Imma to the wedding and promises to take care of her, but says she cannot stay in the castle. Imma refuses to leave, asking for the secret to her sister's youth and beauty. In annoyance, Dora says she got herself flayed. Finally thrown out after violating the royal couple's privacy in their bedroom, Imma finds someone willing to flay her, leaving her bloody and disfigured.

The Flea

The King of Highhills becomes fascinated by a flea, which he hides in his room as a pet. It grows gigantic under his care. When it dies, the King decides to skin it. His daughter Violet tells him she wants to be married, so he offers her as a bride to whoever can guess from what beast the skin was taken, believing no-one can do so. However an ogre correctly identifies the hide by smell. Violet is horrified but her father says he cannot go back on his word. Violet goes through with the marriage but says her father never loved her. The ogre takes Violet to his cave, where she is raped and kept prisoner. A family of acrobats helps her to escape, but the ogre gives chase and kills the entire family. He is mollified by Violet, who then slits his throat. Violet returns to the castle, where the King has grown ill and reveals she has the head of the ogre, the husband he "chose" for her. The King falls to his knees crying and the courtiers follow suit. Violet, too, begins to cry.

Elias, Dora and the King of Strongcliff are among the guests for Violet's coronation as Queen. There, Elias nods to her and the King of Strongcliff. As Violet's father walks her to the throne the crowd looks skyward, where an entertainer is walking a tightrope of fire. We see Dora's beauty begin to fade and, unnoticed, she flees the castle.

Production

Development

According to Matteo Garrone, he was drawn to Giambattista Basile's stories for their mixture of the real and the unreal, and because he found the themes in many of them to still be highly relevant. Garrone had previously been best known for employing a naturalist style in films such as Gomorrah, but argued that all his previous films also have a fairy tale aspect to their narratives. An important source of inspiration was Francisco Goya's Los caprichos collection of etchings. For Garrone, they encapsulated the mood of Basile's tales.

Tale of Tales had a budget corresponding to USD$14.5 million. It was produced through Garrone's company Archimede Film, with co-production support from France's Le Pact and Britain's Recorded Picture Company. It received financing from Rai Cinema and additional support from MiBACT and Eurimages.

Filming

Principal photography commenced on 15 May 2014 and lasted four months. The film was shot entirely on location in various parts of Italy, including Naples (Royal Palace, Palace of Capodimonte and its gardens); Apulia's Castel del Monte (octagonal castle appears in the poster near Vincent Cassel), Gioia del Colle (in particular the throne room), Laterza, Mottola, Statte; Sicily's Donnafugata Castle (gothic castle, stone labyrinth and gardens) and Gole dell'Alcantara in Alcantara (mainly scenes of sea dragon); Abruzzo's Castello di Roccascalegna (appears in the poster with Castel del Monte); Tuscany's Moorish castle of Sammezzano, the towns of Sorano and Sovana (tuff caves); and Lazio (Bosco del Sasseto in Viterbo). "The movie is an epic tribute to the history of fairy tales with great care to the style of their portrayal. The very locations reflect the director’s intention to create an artificial truth, a realistic craftsmanship. All locations had to be real but look as if the settings had been recreated in a studio set."

Themes

In an interview with Variety, director Matteo Garrone emphasized that the three tales have contemporary themes: "plastic surgery; the frenzied desire to have a child; the conflict between generations; the painful passage from adolescence to adulthood." He has also said that although the three stories have distinct themes, they are all connected to the idea of desire that can lead to obsession. Although screenplays were written for other tales in the Basile collection, those filmed told the story of "a woman in three different stages of her life": youth, motherhood and advancing age.

Release/Reception/Box Office

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 83% approval rating based on reviews from 105 critics, with an average rating of 7 out of 10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Visually splendid and narratively satisfying, Tale of Tales packs an off-kilter wallop for mature viewers in search of something different." On Metacritic, the film has received a weighted average score of 72 out of 100 based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".

Budget $14.5 million

Box office $5.5 million

My Review

Greetings again from the darkness. Fairy tales have long been a fruitful source for movie material. Some, like Disney productions, land gently on the family/children end of the scale; while others like the Brothers Grimm material are much darker and adult in nature. And now, along comes director Matteo Garrone and his blending of three stories loosely based on the 17th century tales published by Giambattista Basile … and "black comedy" falls short as a description.

"Il Racconto Dei Racconti" ("Tale of Tales" in English) is an adaptation of Giambattista Basile's works focusing on how desire and obsession lead to tragic outcomes. If you've spent your life knowing only the sanitized versions of fairy tales, then Matteo Garrone's movie will be a real shock: no singing, no cute animals (but there are some scary ones), and no happily ever after. The dialogue is more concentrated in certain spots, allowing the action to be the main focus elsewhere. There's still a lot in the way of aesthetics - palaces, costumes, hairdos - but this is truly a dark fantasy. After all, it's not every movie in which a queen eats a sea monster's heart (with blood smeared all over her face). Not a masterpiece, but still an interesting look at fairy tales, much the way that "Into the Woods" is. I recommend it. A real feather in the cap of Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, Vincent Cassel and Shirley Henderson.

The film contains 3 tales, happen in 3 different kingdoms (Darkwood, Stronghold and High mountain) with authentic locations in Italy, three grandiose castles where human frailties fester between a queen and her son, two elder sisters and a king and his daughter. Garrone doesn't shy away from the gory and chilling elements in the rather dark fairy tales, each tale encompasses its own distinctively dreadful shocker, either an underwater battle against an aquatic dragon and the ensuing devour of its heart, a bat-like monster aiming for slaughter, a blood-sucking flea growing into an abnormally giant size, a primitive ogre running amok or a flayed old hag stained in blood, for sure, they are for adults only.

The tale in Darkwood is about a queen's possession of her adolescent son, a mother's love is unconditional, but unwisely she demands the same from the young prince, however, fate binds him with an identical-looking brother (they were born at the same day under the magic of the dragon heart) and they becomes inseparable, when the queen realises her love cannot be reciprocated, she has to resort to a necromancer to settle the score once for all. Hayek stimulates a possessed urgency in her performance as the queen, again proves that she is unjustly underused in Hollywood as an exotic bombshell only.

In Stronghold, it is a tale about youth and lust, two crone sisters, one of them seduces the king with her youthful voice, but is thrown out of the window when her unsightly appearance is discovered, then being unconsciously rejuvenated by a witch's milk, she transforms into a gorgeous beauty and charms her way to be the new queen, but when her sister badgers to stay with her in the palace, her off-hand lie will lead her sister to experience the inhuman cruelty so as to achieve the same effect, only in vain, eventually her deceitful front will dissolve sooner or later. Here, Shirley Henderson upstages the rest of the line-up with her gravitating persistence and pathos-occasioning commitment as the other sister.

The High mountain tale, a king indulges on his petty hobby, which boomerangs on the marriage of his only daughter, who is married off to an gruesome ogre under his oath, then the young princess must learn from desperation about how to retrieve her freedom using her own hands, a potent feminist manifesto, led by an engaging performance from the newcomer Cave as the princess, also Jones is pretty solid as the king, whose approachable personality makes him more human in a tall-tale.

There is no denying Garrone is further perfecting his exquisite aesthetics in constructing such a grand scale where everyone is donned with gorgeous period costumes, the surreal ingredients are brilliantly crafted too (e.g. the unwieldy underwater shooting is realistic- looking albeit it is obvious not real), and Desplat's score is as captivating as ever. But a jarring dissonance comes from the dialogue, maybe because it is all interpreted in English, or it is adapted from fairy tales written centuries ago, a sense of frustration transpires whenever the characters are hampered by their very limited lines (notably for Hayek and Henderson, both are tremendously evocative, yet all the words they can utter fail to embody that), repetitious, tedious and uninspiring. Sometimes words don't have to mean anything, but if one must use them, use them wisely, otherwise, it will be a drag on the entire film. All three tales are crisscrossed into a coherent narrative, one has no difficulty to understand the plain condemnations beneath each tale and places favourite as one feels, in short, this film is indeed a cinematic spectacle on its own terms, one should not miss. 9.8/10